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Thoughts from a Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign supporter

September 4, 2009 — Mira Vogel

One interest Palestinians, Israelis and Jews share (whether or not they realise it) is to ensure that the Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign remain marginal in the movement to end Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories.

“anyone who is not boycotting Israel (both economically and culturally) is supporting Ethnic Cleansing!”

After that comes a call for American tourists to boycott Scotland, pledges to boycott the United States on grounds of its support of Israel, and the wild opinion “I would NOT describe the U.S.A as a democracy”.

The claim that Israel is conducting ethnic cleansing is false, and it’s also false and vindictive to assert that opposition to the total isolation of Israel is tantamount to support of ethnic cleansing. This person is clearly disaffected to the extreme. From what I know of the SPSC, he or she fits in well there.

I did notice that the SPSC commenter needs serious lessons in spelling and making grammatical sense before they can be taken seriously. One also has to wonder where they and their ilk took those lessons in logic and political science to come up with the simplistic answer to the somewhat complicated situation that is the Middel East.

I would start that corrective lesson, but it’s rather late and I have a life to lead.

Agreed, Mira, (and I need to learn to spell “Middle”, but at least that was a typo), but this person is presumably posting on a website, not sending a personal email to another. In which case, they are hoping to be publicly heard (and applauded), so they need to get their message across.

Of course, it could be that this person’s readers are also grammatically challenged.

Gordon, “email to a mailing list” implies a wide circulation (compare the UCU activists list of ill-repute). If this is so, then my first comment stands.

But then I’m an activist about correct English, having spent 38 years as a Higher Ed. lecturer in sociology, but finding myself also a de facto teacher of English language. Being able to communicate properly as well as effectively in the appropriate language is vital. Otherwise the meaning of what one is trying to say becomes distorted.

If I had any hair left I’d be tearing it out. Why is it that progressives and counter progressives have only one answer to everything: Boycott, ‘no’ and protest? Why is it no one not a single one of them have anything positive anything affirmative any useful action to offer?

The other night, I listened to a feed broadcast that CBC radio picked up from the BBC, of a Brit journalist interviewing Bedouin members of the IDF. The soldiers all told the journalist that they saw their military service as incumbant upon themselves as loyal citizens of their country, following the footsteps of their fathers and grandfathers.

Never did the Brit journalist bother to ask why they felt this loyalty. He only asked about the difficulty it posed for these men.

I guess it’s entirely inconceivable to some that the reason that Bedouins and Druse — as opposed to fellow Muslim Palestinian Arabs — serve in the IDF is because Israeli history and society is pretty complex, and far beyond the ken of the SPSC membership.